We have applied for YC program for this winter and still are waiting for a response, but since the coding is done for a modest ver 1.0, we see no reason to keep it in the basement any longer. Therefore we're going with a "slow launch" strategy to get less than 100 very happy users with kids spending hours in our system. Hopefully this will allow us to figure out potential bugs/usability issues before big PR push.

Technically we are a mixture of online/desktop software with our own local persistence layer written in C++.

Please take a look and let us know how we are doing. Directness and critical thinking are very much welcome!

1. "shortcomings" has one 'm' (About PikLuk)

2. Testimonials from guys names "Joe Bob" sound fake ;-) Just 'Joe Larson' might be better. Similarly, if you can only use the first name of a person providing a testimonial, you should add other descriptive info (such as 'mother of adorable 9 year old Susie" or something.) It is a small thing, but it adds a psychological weight to your testimonials. There are tons of little odd marketing tricks that have been studied and shown to increase conversion rates. That is one of them.

That would actually make a good default home page for the kids: the pages that people recently recommended for kids and a feed from parents friends and kids.

Refine it, and go for it. Remember, execution, execution, execution.

One thought: as a parent, I'd be very interested in seeing your privacy polic(ies) spelled out in detail. I would freak out, hunt you down and drink your blood if I found out you were tracking my kids' web history, logging unencrypted form submissions containing names, etc., etc.

Some suggestions I have are:

I like the web site design, I think it conveys the simple "child-friendly" look. However, the colors are stark and a bit bold, slightly desaturating/lightening them might be a more pleasing to the eye.

A family member of mine is having a hard time keeping their young daughter from accessing stuff she shouldn't be seeing on the internet. The problem is this little girl is quite a hacker, and has found very clever ways of circumventing the protections, even going to the extent to sneak onto her moms computer to get the passwords to disable the controls. I'm not familiar with the details of your protection schemes, but I guess my advice is dont assume kids, just because they are young, cant crack your stuff! Kids are much more computer-savvy these days so make sure all of your bases are covered.

Good luck on your YC appliation. This idea is refreshingly new and I like it.

Our of curiosity, how many downloads so far?

It would be great to see some screen shots of the browser on the web.

Does it run in any OS?

But we are Windows-only at the moment with Mac OS X in the very near future. We are also debating either we should move to Mozilla platform, but it potentially will make a fairly fat download... Currently our browser is 400kb binary with zero dependencies.

I'd move over to FF base and you have all OS' covered. If you have to install a binary, people don't care if it's 400kb or 2Mb. Size, under 10Mb is irrelevant to most of the people. Usability and compatibility is what's important.

Thank you for the feedback!

As far as children's online privacy, this application gives parents a good balance of manual configuration and automatic protection that they can use. We hope it will be a good solution to the common complaint from people with children that they hate sitting behind their kids playing "yard monitor", while they surf on regular browsers.

If you don't have kids, try it anyway. And if possible forward it on to anyone that does. Thanks.

One thing I would say is don't mention the word "entertainment" for kids. If parents are going to get this for their kids, it's going to be for them to help study for school tests, gain knowledge at large, etc. etc... productive things. Maybe you also provide some access to appropriate entertainment content, but don't stress this.

A lot of the other words on the site need to be retooled and fine-tuned, but overall your concept/idea is great.

"At PikLuk, we value your privacy and that of your children. To that end, we: Do not market to your children."

Rather than seal yourself off from this potential revenue source you might want to re-phrase the wording on your site to say that you do not allow unnapproved/offensive ads to reach their kids. I honestly wouldnt feel bad if you offered limited ads since your service is free. I dont think parents will mind as long as the ads are carefully filtered for offensive content.

Wow, you are in essence the gate keeper to the ads kids can see. If ad agencies dont go through you then they cant reach your highly desirable user base, even if they are already advertising on the web page that the child is viewing (b/c you block them). That is just huge.

Sorry if I'm thinking "evil" here, but I'm just offering suggestions with purely business interests in mind.

Children click on adverts, but do they 'convert' - leads or sales. If they do not, that click revenue is going to diminish quickly as advertisers start to realize.

I'm not married nor do I have kids, but I have definitely seen the effects of a child desiring something. Often that desire comes from the influence of an advertisement.

I dont think online ads have traditionally targeted young kids much because there is not really a reliable means to focus in on them. The demographic can be very specific (as far as age range). Pikluk could be an new way to target a specific age bracket on the internet, which would be very desirable to advertisers.

I hear you about the legal issue of blocking ads and replacing them with your own though. People might have serious problems with that..

I think it's a great idea. And for kids trying to get around it, I welcome all those little hackers learning tons about computers.

Only comment from me...if it's going to be marketed/involving children, I probably would have chosen a name with a real word instead of the web 2.0 naming convention. But, since kids have their own languages anyway, you're probably good!

Some things that I think would be really useful: You've got that toolbar on the left side that's always there. For poorly designed sites (disney.go.com is the one I tried) they force a side scroll bar so you can't see the whole page left to right at once. I understand there's a big trade-off here; if that toolbar hides they may not know how to bring it back, but they may not know how to use the left to right scroll bar either. It would be nice to have a appear if moused over option, or perhaps check if the website is not resizing appropriately and shrink the toolbar for those sites.

Another thing I would think would be nice is to be able to filter content within sites. So perhaps pushing CTRL + f12 creates a ban on that particular directory within a white-listed site. In our family that means kongregate.com is okay but kongregate.com/zombie_rampage not so much. That would address the wikipedia concern as well. Perhaps you might even trace sub-directories other users have banned and apply them to your child's browsing if you enable it.

In any case the firefox icons are getting deleted from the desktop and start menu right now and pikluk is now the new default browser for at least three people in this family.

Oh, and as promised:

 // Invisibility Cloak
 // version 0.1
 // Gina Trapani
 // 2006-01-03
 // Released to the public domain.
 //
 // ==UserScript==
 // @name          Invisibility Cloak
 // @description   Turns time-wasting web pages invisible until a specified time of day.
 // @include       http://flickr.com/*
 // @include       http://*.flickr.com/*
 // @include       http://metafilter.com/*
 // @include       http://*.metafilter.com/*
 // @include       http://www.kongregate.com/games/SeanCooper/boxhead-2play-rooms/*
 // ==/UserScript==
 //
 // ==RevisionHistory==
 // Version 0.1:
 // Released: 2006-01-03.
 // Initial release.
 // ==/RevisionHistory==
 
 
 
 (function () {
 	// EDIT THE NEXT LINE TO SET THE HOUR AFTER WHICH SITES SHOULD APPEAR
 	// HOURS IN MILITARY TIME, SO 15 = 3PM
 	var surf_time_after = 23;
 	// END EDIT
 
 	var readable_time = '';
 	if (surf_time_after > 12 )
 	{
 		readable_time = surf_time_after - 12;
 		readable_time = readable_time + 'PM';
 	} else {
 		readable_time = surf_time_after + 'AM';
 	}
 
 	var tstamp = new Date();
 
 	if (1<2 | tstamp.getHours() < surf_time_after )
 	{
 		var b = (document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]);
 		b.setAttribute('style', 'display:none!important');
 		alert("This game or site has been deemed shady by the parents!");
 	}
 
 })();

This seems to be the most common (and very useful) feedback topic.

Thank you guys very much. http://pikluk.com/more

It's a valid point: to learn to use the Internet, you actually have to use the Internet. Using this program will only teach you how to use this program, much as a video game console won't quite teach you to use a computer.

However, the target market is too young to really need to learn any sort of skills. Save it for when they can flash the BIOS to boot from a Live CD...

If that's the case, then it seems you guys have a solid idea :)

Like if you don't sign in/connect-the-browser-to-an-account, it'll only let you go to a few sample pages and let you mess around with a few settings. As soon as you try to do anything else, a "Please sign up" form appears.

I could see parents shelling out $5-$10/month so their kids have virgin eyes and ears for an extra half-decade...

You choose a list of web sites appropriate for each child in your family. PikLuk will restrict their online exploration to these sites.

This, for example, means kids growing up who don't use Google -- who don't have basic proficiency with the Internet. That's awful.

[Rolls eyes]

who don't have basic proficiency with the Internet

[Rolls eyes]

That's awful.

[Rolls eyes]

There are 60 billion (or more) hard core porn images on the internets. No need to expose 8 year olds to them.

I think the search box in wikipedia would be sufficient to acclimate them to the whole "Type word, press search" paradigm. They'll be prepared...if only for google. I mean, Bill Gates had a teletype into a mainframe, so maybe they're doomed anyway.

EDIT: By the way, I've seen first hand how kids go straight for the very worst stuff on the web, and it's pretty depressing. So, there's definitely a valid market for this kind of thing...

Regarding porn: the more you make it a big important taboo, the more people get obsessed with it and work to beat your censorship.

As far as wikipedia, we will be removing that as a suggested site, for some of the reasons mentioned here.